Because there are people out there using some scientific results to further their agenda, it makes sense to deny the scientific results. And because some of the people apparently have stated things of a completely different topic in a way that can be construed to be not fully true, it is more reason to deny the scientific results. Yeah. Makes sense. Don't accept any results, because there might be someone whose political agenda might be furthered by the result. Deny the fact that high speed lead bullets entering the body might be bad for the health because it could be used to ask for gun control! Deny the fact that double speed means four times the length needed for a complete stop because people might use it to ask for speed limits! And because some people have not fully supported views about the role of meat in your metabolism, better deny the economic problems with anti-competitive behavior of monopolistic companies, because some of the vegetarians might as for the enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation!

The thesis was that after the Great Oxygenation Event 2.1 billion years ago, multicellular life appeared, but when the oxygen levels sank again, it died out without leaving traces. So it was not pressure from future life forms, but from the abiotic conditions that caused the dead-end.

The banches of life appearing during the Franceville era weren't less viable than the ones appearing in the Ediacara fauna. If oxygene levels today would drop below 10%, multicellular life would probably be as endangered than it was 2.1 billion years ago.

What is much more interesting (and widely underreported) is that the Cambrian Explosion was neither an explosion -- we had the Ediacara fauna before --, nor was the Ediacara fauna the first multicellar life on earth.

There have been multicellar livings before, like the Gabonionta, about 2.1 billion years ago, which existed for about 200 million years and have died out again.

You as a Westerner are surely taught: Yes, only the freedom you earn for yourself is true freedom. You might earn it by overthrowing your oppressors or you may earn it by fending off the attempts to take your freedom. And we have seen again and again: Freedom that was brought from somewhere else didn't stay very long. Despite the claims of many ideologues, you can't export freedom. Yes, you can lead by example. Yes, you can overthrow an oppressor. But for a group of people to stay free they have to be able to earn their freedom themselves.

Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.

But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.

If anyone in the U.S. is really interested in what helped to tear down the Wall, look at Helsinki and at the Helsinki Final Act. All the discussions and dissents in the former Communist bloc were based on the Helsinki Final Act, and on the signatures the East European countries put under the agreement on free speech and free travel. This is, what fueled the hope and the struggle. Not a propaganda show by the U.S. president who was in the same moment talking bad about the very documents that were so dear and important to us.

Yay to Cladistics! ;)

Innocent until proven guilty is a legal practice that only applies in criminal law, and nowhere else. In civil cases, there is no such concept als "guilt". If we are not talking about a criminal case, innocent until proven guilty does not apply.

It is not forbidden to discover fossils or gold. It is forbidden to excavate them or mine it without a license. That's quite a difference.

Spoken as an East German: The Berlin Wall Speech was a gesture towards the own people in the U.S., nothing more, nothing less. It worked. The majority of the U.S. still believes this speech had a big impact on the East. We, the East Germans knew that the Berlin Wall was evil, we didn't need Ronald Reagan to point this out to us. We already had 200 shot dead who were trying to get over the Wall. We had thousands of people in prison who were caught planning to cross the Wall. We had singer-songwriter singing about the Wall, and how it cut us off most of the world. When those singer-songwrites sung about not being able to travel to Paris, we cheered, and we were looking up to them for having the braveness to do so. When Ronald Reagan did this, we were annoyed about the big posture and grandstanding and the arrogance of the most powerful man of the world, and we felt like he stole our symbol from us.

The name of the guy is Pater Georges Lemaître, a belgian Jesuit.

General Relativity was widely accepted four years after the initial publishing (after Sir Arthur Eddington published his fundamental Mathematical Theory of Relativity), and Special Relativity was a new mathematical approach to the Poincaré-Lorentz-cosmology of 1892, published more than a decade before (which in turn tried to incorporate the Maxwell equations from 1879 into Newtonian physics).

Quantum mechanics were proposed by Max Planck in 1900, 1905 it was used by Albert Einstein to explain the photoelectric effect (for which he got awarded the Nobel price in 1921), and by the 1920 it was already heavily reworked and modified by the works of people like Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie and Max Born.

So Relativity and Quantum mechanics are quite bad examples for what you want to say. They were adapted very quickly instead.

Maybe you know how to can food, if you have cans and food available. But do you know how to get the metal in exactly the right tin form to make cans in the first place? Do you know which types of tin you can use for food and which ones to avoid? How do you deal with the corrosion of iron, with poisonous ions from copper, lead and zinc?

But dark in this case is completely cromulent, as dark implicitely means no light, and in fact, dark matter (and also dark energy) doesn't emit any light or even interact with light. This matter really is dark in the original sense of the word, all later connotations not withstanding.

No, that's one of the things a court is for: Clear up legal facts if they are not explicitely stated in the law. The E.U. copyright directive and the laws in different countries don't mention embedding, and thus a court decides when the question comes up. In this case, the system works exactly as it is supposed to be.

No. They both are angry about them. because Edward Snowden pointed out to the U.S. government how easy it is to get access to very important information at the NSA. Until them, they could get those information uninhibited by just having some contractors getting into the NSA and then go shopping. Now the NSA knows how vulnerable the agency actually is and probably has taken countermeasures.